"Wednesday, April 27, 2005 shows a dust storm across the western desert of Iraq on Tuesday April 26, 2005. The storm spawned near the border of Syria and Jordan, leaving a heavy sheet of dust in its wake. (AP Photo/US Army, Sgt Shannon Arledge)"

Those are quite common in the second summer of the monsoon here in Phoenix, Arizona coming from the east. It is well known that the dust comes as far away as Mongolia and paves destruction and creates microbursts along its path.

It turns out a friend is working at the base where those pictures were taken. When I saw the pictures, I emailed him since, hey, how big is Iraq anyway? If he's there, I'm sure he saw it, right?

Dude that dust storm was fucking awesome. We watched it roll in. Itwas traveling at 40 knots. A giant wall of dust.

Just prior to it hitting everything was calm. Then a whole shitload ofbirds came flying by. Winds instantly picked up and about 30 secondslater the dust wall hit. It was fun. Really it was quite tame, it justlooked bad.

I've tried to explain to people for a while how one time I was flying over Arizona or New Mexico or some backwards southwestern state like that, and I look ahead and there's this mile+ high wall of sand and our plane is about to slam into it. So we do and it doesn't hurt the plane any, but a few minutes later the captain gets on the horn and says "you know, we're going to drop you guys off in Las Vegas". Anyway, it looked like in those pictures, except less rolling and more static, and much taller!